verb

We finished the dress rehearsal an hour before we let the audience in, and were still finding scenes we could not get through without corpsing (actors laughing at each other on stage) or things that needed to be re-staged for props to work.

That's why everyone has a story about a Wise Man corpsing at a key moment, or a showboating Shepherd hogging the limelight.

Origin

Middle English (denoting the living body of a person or animal): alteration of corse by association with Latincorpus, a change which also took place in French (Old Frenchcors becoming corps). The p was originally silent, as in French; the final e was rare before the 19th century, but now distinguishes corpse from corps.

At one time corpses did not have to be dead. Until the early 18th century a corpse (from Latin corpus ‘body’) could be the living body of a person or animal, as in ‘We often see…a fair and beautiful corpse but a foul and ugly mind’ (Thomas Walkington, 1607). You would need to specify ‘a dead corpse’ or some similar expression if you were talking about a dead body. In time, you could simply say ‘a corpse’ and people would assume that you meant a dead person. The p used to be silent and the final e was rare before the 19th century. In fact, corpse and corps (late 16th century), ‘a division of an army’ are basically the same word. Latin corpus has given us several words, among them corporation (Late Middle English), corpulent (Late Middle English) or ‘fat’, corset (Middle English) a ‘little body’, and incorporate (Late Middle English). A corporal (mid 16th century) is in charge of a ‘body’ of troops.